History of Baden-Württemberg

The Thirty Years War
(1618-1648)

The longest war in German history became, through the intervention of
external powers, a European war. The cause was mainly the conflict of
religious denominations as a result of the Reformation. Thus in the southwest
of the empire, Catholic and Protestant princes faced one another as enemies,
the Catholics (Emperor, Bavaria) united in the "League," the Protestants
(Electorate Palatine, Baden-Durlach, Württemberg) in the "Union."
The war began in 1618 with the Defenestration of Prague.

Nearly all parts of the southwest experienced troop movements and battles.
The map shows the extent to which the population suffered losses due to
direct military action or to disease. The Black Forest remained unmolested.
The most affected were the Palatinate, the Neckar land, the Alb and the
Danube, but also on the Upper Rhine.

The Palatine War (1619 - 1622). In 1619 the Bohemians deposed
their Catholic king from the House of Habsburg, and offered the crown
to a Protestant prince, the Prince Elector Friedrich V of the Palatinate.
Most of his councilors and several friendly princes advised him against
accepting. But Friedrich opted for the Bohemian crown. With Elisabeth,
his young English wife, he got into the coach and drove from Heidelberg
to Prague. In November 1619, he was crowned there. Almost exactly a year
later, in November 1620, he lost the battle of White Mountain by Prague
to Tilly, the commander of the Catholic League. He fled clear through
Germany to the Netherlands. Along with the Bohemian crown, he had also
lost the Palatinate.
Soon thereafter, Margrave Friedrich Georg of Baden-Durlach also had to
depart his little country in haste. He had dared to oppose Tilly, and
was beaten in the Battle of Wimpfen (1622). Tilly moved through the Kraichgau
and took Heidelberg.

The relatively peaceful years. The war shifted to northern Germany.
The German southwest remained generally spared for years. It seemed as
though the emperor and the Catholic League would finally pull out a victory.
The page turned as the Swedish King Gustav Adolf came in on the side of
the Protestants (1630). His triumphal procession led him deep into the
German south. Even Baden-Durlach and Württemberg welcomed him as a liberator.
The fortunes of war, however, were loyal to neither side. Next both sides
lost their greatest commanders: Gustav Adolf ell in the battle by Lutzen
near Leipzig. Wallenstein, the commander-in-chief of the imperial troops,
was murdered in 1634 in Eger.

Fourteen years of terror (1634 - 1648). For the Protestants, the
year 1634 brought a turn for the worse. The Swedish lost the decisive
battle at Nördlingen. Then the imperial forces flooded into the Duchy
of Württemberg. Waiblingen, Herrenberg and Calw were burned down, Stuttgart
occupied.

Now the French came into the war. Even though France was purely Catholic,
it allied itself with the German Protestants. There was no chance that
the emperor would win the war. Thus the southwest again became a theater
of war. For the lands on the Upper Rhine and the Neckar, the worst years
began. A whole array of battles took place here: Rheinfelden (1638), Tuttlingen
(1643), Freiburg (1644), Herbsthausen near Mergentheim (1645). Neither
side won a decisive victory. But the population suffered terribly, under
both friend and foe. The armies fell on the land, from which they had
to sustain themselves, like swarms of locusts. The last battle of the
war took place at Zusmarshausen, west of Augsburg.

As the bells of peace rang out in 1648, many villages and cities in the
German southwest were impoverished from quartering troops, were partly
destroyed, burned out. The Duchy of Württemberg alone had lost almost
two thirds of its population from hunger and disease, murder and killing.
In 1618 it had 350,000 inhabitants, in 1648 just 120,000. The following
examples come from the Münsingen district and show the numbers of married
couples and buildings before and after the war:

Married Couples

Houses and barns

City of Münsingen

191

96

240

157

Apfelstetten

56

15

74

29

Auingen

87

25

115

49

Böttingen

64

14

82

39

Hundersingen

45

3

54

5

Mehrstetten

132

26

156

68

Mundingen

48

10

35

23

An important outcome of the Peace of Westphalia was that now,
along with Catholics and Lutherans, the Reformed were also tolerated.
This was important for the Palatinate.

For one part of the southwest, a peace of 150 years began. On the Middle
Neckar, in the whole Upper Rhine area and especially in the Electorate
Palatine the wars waged by the French King Louis XIV from 1674 to 1714
caused further terrible destruction.
France penetrated through acquired possessions in Alsace to the Rhine
border. Switzerland separated from the German empire.